The Main Interest of My Research Is Exploring National Identity Through Minority Students

Exploring national identity through minority students’ discourse: Objectives and problems in researching the Greek Intercultural School By Evmorfia Kipouropoulou, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Education, Faculty of Philosophy, A.U.TH. Gr

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007

Introduction The main interest of my research is exploring national identity through minority students’ discourse. The interest of examining national identity has emerged in Greece recently due to the political and social changes that occurred in the Balkans and the Former Soviet Union, provoking the appearance of recent immigration in Greece, especially during the 1990’s. The number of immigrants that came to Greece at the early 1990’s is about 600.000 (Damanakis 1997: 46-47), and this number has been increasing since then, which means that a large number of the population consists of “culturally different people”. The percentage of immigrant students during the year 2004-2006 was 8.8% (Drettakis 2007). In certain schools in Athens and Thessaloniki the number of immigrant students is about 45% (Linardou 2006). Greece, as a country was thought of as a nation with only “pure” Greek population who descend from ancient Greeks. The greek national identity was constructed by the myth of the ancient origin and the continuation of the greek nation through time and place. Greece was presented as a country which had been sending and not receiving immigrants. As a result, recent immigration in Greece has provoked a great deal of embarrassment for the greek government –who had to look for ways of managing the proceedings of the incorporation of immigrants–, of xenophobia and racism. According to certain statistics, the majority of immigrants in Greece are of Albanian origin followed by students from the countries of the Former Soviet Union, especially from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia and also from Romania, Moldavy, Iraq, China etc. There is also a distinction amongst immigrants: the ones that have a Greek origin and come from the countries of the Former Soviet Union, which are called homogeneis, aliens of Greek descent (Christopoulos & Tsitselikis) and the ones that are foreigners. Immigrants of Greek descent have moved to Greece for several reasons, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the notion of the greek minority being threatened in the newly established

1 states, poverty and unemployment, civil wars (such as in Aphasia of Georgia) (Pelagidis 2003: 41) etc.

2 Intercultural School in simple words The Greek educational system had to adjust to this reality and officially accept its multicultural nature by moving on through changes, to include foreign students. Therefore, in 1980 special classes have been set up for two main purposes: the first ones have been set up to help children learn the greek language and the second ones to help children understand better some subjects such as Greek Language, History, Mathematics; these classes are called “Reception Classes” and “Preparation groups”. The main goal of these classes is the inclusion of the foreign students as quickly as possible into the mainstream classes. Surprisingly enough, these classes do not encourage students to continue cultivating their own culture. A special type of schools has also been established for the “repatriated” students, called Schools for the Repatriated. Unfortunately, these schools turned out to be “ghettos” and not centres for bilingual education and multiculturalism. The aim again is to include students in the Greek educational system but –as we can see– through their isolation separating them from their Greek peers (Damanakis op.cit.: 64-83). It is obvious that for the Greek education system, foreign students have a kind of “cultural lack” that must be dealt with so that these students can be assimilated into the greek educational and social context. Therefore, in 1996 a new law introduced a new type of school, the Inter- Cultural Education schools. Inter-Cultural Schools function under the law of the greek public education system and the main goal is to support foreign students and help them to express their difference in a multicultural school and use positively their different “cultural capital”. For this purpose the greek language is taught as a second language and sometimes –if it is permitted by bureaucracy– foreign teachers are employed to co-operate with greek teachers in the classroom. For the employment of the latter, the knowledge of a Balkan language or the Russian language is considered as an advantage. Intercultural Schools in Greece have been running since 1996 and according to the greek law, these schools may have a different curriculum, by giving extra courses to students, having a small number of students in each class and having reduced teaching hours for teachers. The school curriculum is in accordance with the official curriculum, ideology and legislation of inter-cultural education. Intercultural Schools run two Reception Classes, one that lasts for one year and emphasizes on teaching the greek language as a second one, and Reception Class II that offers extra parallel courses with mainstream classes which last for two years. In Secondary Intercultural Schools, students attend Reception Class I and have fourteen hours of modern greek language, four hours of Mathematics and four hours of other subjects. They attend mainstream

3 classes in Mathematics, Physics, Computing Science, Foreign Language and Art. Apart from the ordinary school books, teachers use special books made by the Centre of Intercultural Education. According to the law, courses of culture and language of immigrant students are optional and depend upon a certain number of students (7-15). These classes do not actually run for a number of reasons:  the wide multiculturalism of the student population and the difficulty of choosing the language and culture for the above courses,  there are no official guidelines concerning teaching methodology coming from the Institute of Education or the Ministry on how to manage such classes outside the school curriculum.  Preparation Groups run outside the school programme and concern students that do not attended Reception Classes. The student population is mixed in Inter-Cultural Schools and the school must consist of 60% of Greek students and 40% of foreign students. Unfortunately, these rates are not always respected but there is a tendency either to reduce the number of foreign students or that of Greek students. Sometimes, an inter-cultural school is easy to become a “ghetto”. Today 26 Intercultural Schools and 322 Reception Classes run in Greece (Linardou op.cit.). Finally, a university project called “Repatriated and foreign children’s enrollment at school” has begun running this year. The main goal of this programme is the confrontation of school failure of immigrant students and their equal incorporation into school and society (http://web.auth.gr/eppas/).

Researching the Intercultural School My research is a case study including some of the techniques of the ethnographic method and took place in the Inter-Cultural School of Thessaloniki in January 2005. This school was chosen for the students’ population: the school consists of a 30% of foreign students and 70% of Greek students. School teachers were willing to cooperate with me and help me with my research. My research was completed in December of 2005. The number of foreign students at the beginning of the research was 69 out of 313 of the total student population. It is necessary to point out that the number of foreign students is not stable during the school year. Therefore, at the end of the school year the student population consisted of 22% of foreign students (less than the previous years). This means that it was not possible for me to control the number of the students that could participate in my research. The final number of students that participated in my research also depended upon the

4 willingness of the students themselves and upon the tolerance of the school for my long lasting visit. I mention the tolerance of the school, because in Greece it is difficult for the researcher to get in touch and cooperate with the school, participate and collect data during school hours. It is necessary first, to get permission from the greek Institute of Education. The problem here is that it takes a very long time to get this permission because of the beaurocratic procedures and a researcher also has to wait for a long time too, to start her own research. Another difficulty that I faced was that I always had to ask teachers for permission to enter their classrooms and make observations. Teachers of the Preparation Groups were willing to cooperate –and were indeed very cooperative– but it was a little bit difficult to find and explain to the other teachers what I was researching and how they could help me with my research. The reasons were three:  First, I had to find out in which classes –except for the Preparation Groups and the Reception Classes– immigrant students that had been in Greece for many years attended courses asking the students themselves.  Second, I had to interrupt the courses every time I wanted to have an interview with a student. It was almost impossible to take an interview after school hours. Besides, most of the time Preparation Groups were held after the mainstream school programme.  And finally, it was very difficult to find a space where I could have the interviews, because the school was not big enough to spare a classroom. Another issue was the diverse language level of the students that made the comprehension of the questions during the interviews difficult, so I had to paraphrase the questions, having in mind not to imply the answers. My communication with children during my presence at school, though, helped me overcome this difficult situation. When my research was completed I had collected 36 semi- structured interviews of 21 female and 15 male students coming from Albania, Russia, Georgia, Germany, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Saint Dominique, Azerbaitzan and Ukraine.

Research Aims In my research I am trying to find out:  immigrant students national identity’s characteristics based on the elements of national identity such as homeland, language, tradition, nostalgia, culture etc.),  if they construct a multidimensional identity,  if friendship depends upon national characteristics,

5  if children expect and desire to return to their homelands, and finally  this research gives me the chance to compare the perception of students who have lived in Greece for one or two years and that of students who have lived in Greece for many years. It is important to underline that although I had defined the aims at the beginning of my research, I realized that I had to redefine them during the research and its parameters, because of the multiplicity of the interaction with school and children.

National identity and immigration: a brief presentation National identity is an abstract and multi-dimensional construction which is built up through the representations of the self and the national others. National identity is used to reflect the values and history that national group recognize as common (Holmes 1995: 4-5). According to the promordial national identity approach, the idea of national identity is related to the notion of continuity that generations experience through their common memory of previous facts and periods. The notion of national is also related to commonly accepted ideas related to the collective fate and culture. It is based upon the “ethnic perception of the nation” that reflects common language, common myths, symbols and traditions (Smith 2000: 47). From the point of view of modernism, national identity expresses a notion of political community that reflects common institutions and a common code of rights and obligations. A group of people become a nation when they mutually recognize specific and stable rights and obligations in the name of their common property, as members of the same ethnic group (Gellner 1992[1983]: 22-23, Hobsbawm 1994: 22). Members of a nation share a unified political will and are united under a common culture and political ideology, common memories, myths, symbols and traditions. It is difficult and perhaps unwise to try defining national or ethnic identity due to its multidimensional, changeable, narrative and ambiguous –as Homi Bhabha points out– nature (Homi Bhabha From the Introduction “Narrating the Nation” to Nation and Narration http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/nation.html). He also recognises –as he belongs to the meta-colonial studies– the marginalization of immigrants in the theoretical construction of nations. Benedict Anderson (1991) talks about imagined communities and Stuart Hall (1996) emphasizes the fluidity and multiplicity of identities, especially in a global and, at the same time, local world. Those characteristics of identity become more ambiguous and dilemmatic when we try to find out how immigrant children perceive and construct their identity.

6 Foreign children face the problem of language barrier, the differentiation of their culture, the need to adjust to the new society of the “reception state” and racism. For immigrant children the procedure of creating their cultural identity is interrupted. Therefore, when they arrive in their new country they face certain steps during the development of their identity: a) they trust or distrust the new culture, b) they embody certain ways of thinking, new ways of behaviour, values and attitudes through language. In the phase of adjusting and assimilation in the new culture they construct a new meaning of self-identity. If the child experiences strong bonds with its family then it reflects the minority culture. The knowledge of language and culture depends on the motives of a child. There is a possibility of an identity crisis, because the child feels guilty and embarrassed when s/he tries to adjust and accept the values of the new culture. It is important to say that immigrant children experience multiple layers of expectations and, therefore, they do not feel safe and secure as native children do in most cases (Boteram 1989: 52- 65). As Hobsbawm points out, (Hobsbawm 1994: 222-223), members of immigrant communities may be incorporated in the dominant society, may accept their minority identity and try to reduce their minority disadvantages expressing a minority discourse, or they may emphasize on their identity and express an ethnic nationalism. “Second generation” children are faced with a contradictory socialization. This is a basic differentiation between the first and the second generation: the members of the first generation have already been socialized in their culture before their arrival in the new country (Ventoura 1994: 60-61). Members of minority groups continuously have to interpret daily situations if they want to communicate successfully in their new cultural environment. In every situation identity is not stable and is always negotiable through the interaction between social subject and social environment. (Ventoura op.cit.: 60-61, 68 -69).

Results: A first description A first reading and a first level examination of the students’ interviews indicate how immigrant students perceive their own identity. Therefore, we can observe and describe that:  Greek language’s lack of knowledge is the first issue that embarrasses when they come to Greece and, on the contrary, its knowledge would be the major factor that can help them to adjust.  It is interesting that children in every question –for example at the question: “Which language do you speak at home”– asked me to specify if I was referring to “here” or “there”. But on the other hand, they never asked for clarification

7 when I asked them to describe their town. That only happened once: their town is in their homeland.  As for the question asking about the amount of time they had been in Greece all students were very exact. They seem to count almost every day of their stay in Greece. For example: one year and three months, one year and eight months, half a year etc. This exact reference of time concerns only the students that have not lived in Greece for a long time.  Foreign students form friendships with other foreign students, as they find a sort of solidarity and acceptance. They use their language to communicate with each other, especially students that have not lived in Greece for long.  Children feel nostalgia for their homeland but the level of nostalgia is not the same for every student. For example, a Russian student mentions that as years go by he does not remember his country. Albanian students feel this nostalgia more intensely and they want to return to their country. For Albanian students, it is important to mention that they feel very lonely, they do not have a lot of friends and they experience racism. The other children –except for a black girl from Saint Dominique– did not mention racism or discrimination.

An Albanian male student says:

“ A lot of Greeks don’t want the Albanians and in Albania Albanians don’t want Greeks. I am not like that” and a girl says: “ They say that Albanians steal, make trouble…I said, ok, once, but don’t Russians make trouble too?”

An Albanian girl expresses her nostalgia for her country:

“I didn’t want to stay here, I was crying […] I don’t know. I didn’t have any friends. There was only my mom. I was feeling very lonely at home. I didn’t know what to do. The Greek language seemed to me a very difficult one[…]When I watch the Albanian channel, I start crying and I say to my mom: ‘I want to go back to Albania’[…] I would like to go back, to buy a house and move on with my life in Albania”.  A multi-language environment is familiar to students from countries of the Former Soviet Union and especially to homogeneis students from Russia. Therefore, for these children language is not the basic characteristic that defines their national identity. The most important issue is the origin of their grandfathers, which is passed on to them

8 through narration. Usually, this place is not where that they themselves were born, but the place where they grew up. Sometimes, they feel embarrassed to talk about their national identity expressing multiple and dilemmatic identities. For example, the girl from Azerbaijan was born in Uzbekistan and three years later her parents moved to Azerbaijan, which she considers as her homeland. In a relative question she answers:

“We spoke the Russian language at school but at home our mother tongue” and about her identity she says: “My father is Pontic Greek1. I don’t know. He is Pontic Greek, my grandfather is greek and my grate-grand father and grate- grand mother were Greeks, too. My mother is Russian. I am a Pontic Greek person from Azerbaijan”. Another girl from Russia who was born in Georgia but doesn’t mention it from the beginning says:

“I don’ t know. I am Pontic Greek…I don’t know. We have a small percentage of Pontic origin, a little bit... I am Greek” and her brother answers: “I am not like a foreign person in Greece, because we are Pontic Greeks” […] “We are going to live here and die here. If my parents die, I will be alone in Russia, therefore, it is better for me to die here, too.”[…] “As long as I live here, I will never say that I am Greek. How can I say that? I am Pontic Greek. How can I change that?”

Another boy from Russia tries to describe his identity saying:

“I am Greek or Pontic Greek. I don’t know. A Pontic Greek is a person who speaks the Pontic Greek language. I don’t speak it. I am from Russia but I am Greek. When we were in Russia they reorganized us as Greeks. Perhaps I am not Greek but my children will be Greeks”.

Another male student from Kazakhstan, having Russian as his first language, says that he comes from Kazakhstan, he does not speak the language, only the Russian language, and he expresses a dilemma when he is asked about his homeland:

Q: Which is your origin? St: I am Pontic Greek, my mother is Greek and my father is Greek. Q: They are Greeks who were born in Kazakhstan? St: Yes, my grandmother was born in Baku and they come from Baku. Q : And what do you feel that you are? St: I was born in Tarash too.

1 The word Pontic Greek in the Greek language stands for an ethnic group that comes from the region of Pontos (Asia Minor) in Asia, in present Turkey. It’s an ethnic group that suffered genocide by the Turks and were forced to immigrate to Greece.

9 Q: Which is your homeland? St: Homeland…Do you mean where I was born? Q: When I ask you this question, what would you answer me? St: Mm, Greece, I think (he lowers his voice) but if we think from another point of view (...) Q: What do you mean by saying that? St: I didn’t quite understand this: when we speak about homeland, do we mean what I feel as my homeland? I still can not say which one I feel as my homeland. I think both of them.

The boy from Kazakhstan constructs a dilemmatic discourse concerning the notion of homeland which is not clearly defined. He wants me to be more concrete since he seems to perceive the notion of homeland either by talking about the country where he was born – homeland, do you mean where I was born?”– or by using sentimental criteria trying to define the notion of homeland –“I didn’t quite understand this: when we speak about homeland do we mean what I feel as my homeland?”, and he finally embarrassingly answers that both countries are his homeland.

 The Albanian students hide their Muslim religion or they accept it low-voiced during the interview. It is interesting that an Albanian Muslim girl was wearing a golden cross, which was a gift from her father.

An Albanian student talks about his religion saying:

“ My grandfather says that we were Christians too, my grate-grandfather was Christian. My parents are Muslims. I like being Muslim in Albania. I don’t know”.

 For the students that have lived in a multi-language environment language does not seem to be the basic characteristic of their identity especially if this language is the Turkish one. Children from Russia with a Greek decent deny it. However, foreign students also express the typical characteristics of the formal national discourse when they talk about their identity, such as the element of common language, fatherland, the element of “blood” that connects them to the members of their national or ethnic community, the common traditions etc.

A Russian boy student says:

10 “ If you learn the greek language, you may feel Greek. I don’t know. I may become half Greek. You have to learn the greek traditions and preserve them, as Greeks do. But in my heart I will always be the same”.

And an Albanian student feels the same way:

“I can not become Greek. Albania is in my blood”.

Most of them think that national identity is stable and can never be changed while a boy student identified himself as a Pontic Greek who comes from Russia and wants to learn Georgian dances, because he was born in Georgia.  As for the students who have been in Greece for a long time it appears that the dilemmatic discourse tends to be reduced but isn’t eliminated completely: For an Armenian student who has been in Greece for about ten years national identity is difficult to change, because: “Homeland is homeland”. Reading immigrant students’ discourse we observe that they construct a multiple and multidimensional national identity. A further systematic study of the research data using Critical Discourse Analysis will hopefully show a lot of different ways through which immigrant students shape their national identity. Studying school discourse can help us understand the attitudes and the ways that children –especially immigrant children who are usually marginalised– construct reality, the “self” and the “other” aw well as their subjectivity.

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